HT204053 We have three iPhones but one Apple ID because I pay for the acct whenever we buy Apps or music. However, it's frustrating that when we share iCloud it merges our notes and contacts even if we say "DO NOT MERGE." I've also lost my notes but cou

Question

We have three iPhones but one Apple ID because I pay for the acct whenever we buy Apps or music.  However, it's frustrating that when we share iCloud it merges our notes and contacts even if we say "DO NOT MERGE."  I've also lost my notes but could not recover them even if I did a restore.

Answer 1

You can share the same iTunes ID on all your devices and still have different iCloud accounts with different IDs on them.  The ID you use for iTunes does not need to be the same as the ID used for iCloud.
If you want to migrate your devices to separate accounts, on the devices that will be moving save any photo stream photos to your camera roll by opening the photo stream album in the thumbnail view, tapping Edit, then tap all the photos you want to save, tap Share and tap Save to Camera Roll.  Also email any synced notes to yourself so you can recreate them in the new account.  Finally, if you are syncing any iWork documents with iCloud, go to the iWork app settings and turn off iCloud syncing.
Once this is done, go to Settings>iCloud, scroll to the bottom and tap Delete Account.  (This will only delete the account from this phone, not from iCloud.  The phone that will be keeping the account will not be effected by this.)  When prompted about what to do with the iCloud data, be sure to select Keep On My iPhone.  Next, set up a new iCloud account using a different Apple ID (if you don't have one, tap Get a Free Apple ID at the bottom).  Then turn iCloud data syncing for contacts, etc. back to On, and when prompted about merging with iCloud, choose Merge.  This will upload the data to the new account.
Once the phones are all on separate accounts you can  then have to go to icloud.com on your computer and sign into each iCloud account separately and manually delete the data you don't want from each account.